I haven’t really given it much thought, my sense of home. I think part of this is because I’ve never really worried about having it taken away. Another part is because I’ve lived a somewhat transitive life, especially during my formative years in adolescence. For instance, I went to four different high schools in four different cities from grade 8 to 12. But I think a key reason I haven’t thought much about my sense of home is because this sense is something that mostly exists in the primitive depths of my subconscious. I think my sense of home is like my sense of possession over a romantic partner, or my sense of threat when seeing a stranger brandish a weapon. These senses, these intuitive reactions, are integral parts of my self both as a person but mostly as a homo sapien. And I’m convinced that no amount of culture, education, or socialization will make these senses go away. They may get buried and become more easily controlled, and some of them I may not even like or want to have. But they are still there no matter what.

But this is course on stories not psychoanalytic theory or evolution psychology. What stories do I tell myself that connect me to this land we call Canada and make it my home? That’s a hard questions. Reflecting on this has led me down two paths. Let me start with the stories I have told myself that foster a sense of unbelonging to my home.

Since I can remember, I’ve always felt like a guest and a sojourner rather than an inhabitant or occupant. The first home I remember was as shabby apartment my mother rented from a smelly and shady manager in New Westminster. Even at a young age, I felt that we were merely staying there, and our stay was out of necessity rather than choice or want. I have felt that for every place I lived since. I am a tenant not an owner.

Living in over four different cities during high school was also out of necessity. It was necessarily determined that I followed my father on his journey. I followed him on his path of self-destruction toward a predetermined endpoint: death. And along the way, we stayed with various family members and in hotels as guests. Sure this was humiliating at times. But these keepers were frozen in time, watching us from the outside, as we travelled along on our existential road trip.

So maybe I don’t have stories that connect me to this land we call Canada. Or maybe I do but they operate in the background and as so obvious I don’t even notice them. Or perhaps they’re there but are unimportant to me. I’m really not sure, all this is new to me.

My second reflective path has taken me through the terrain of identity and Canadian patriotism. What stories do I tell myself that make it so I feel at home here in Canada? What stories do I tell myself that make me feel Canadian? For one thing, these questions only seem to come up either within (artificial) academic settings, or when my tribalistic instincts are being activated. Being a Canadian and having a Canadian home only matters to me when an outgroup member is threatening to take something away, or when creating esteem with an ingroup member. At least that’s how I look at it. Canadian identity is a relational property in that its existence requires an antagonist. Since we don’t face much conflict here within Canada, or between Canada and other nations, Canadians have little Canadian identity. The First Nations, on the other hand, face plenty of conflict, but their identity and cohesiveness has been systematically dismantled by their oppressors.

I am at home here in Canada because this is the place I happen to be born. I feel at home because this is my instinctual reaction to living here. The stories I tell myself about my Canadian home are like wet paper. I am an unsentimental Canadian.

Hello all!

Here is my story. Writing fiction is something I’ve almost never done so it was strange experience in the sense that this came from free association rather than rational (I hope) deliberation. It was also strange that archaic language cropped up here.

I have a great story to tell you. It’s about how evil came into this world. It all started with three brothers who hated each other. But their hate is not like the hate we know today. For during this time in the progress of humanity, hate was neither an act nor a word, but was a thought. It was something people kept inside at all costs even if it killed them doing so. In fact, this kind of internalized hate killed people all the time. It devoured them like cancer.

Hate was kept inside for one simple reason: externalized hate was thought to anger the powerful Eye in the sky. This Eye watched everything everyone did with a piercing judgmental gaze, mysterious and hungry. It was hungry for hate, and if fed, it would turn everything to ash. So everyone lived in fear of the Eye. They felt it watching and waiting. They felt it like they felt the air that suffocated them but was neither seen nor heard.

The brother that hated each other were like all people who lived during this quaint time. First off, they were polite and at times sweet. So sweet in fact that they made each other and anyone else who had a taste sick. They spoke with a frantic cadence, as if they were afraid to be caught saying something wrong or incorrect (which they did all the time as everyone knew but wouldn’t say). This matched their countenance of nervousness and agitation which left the impression that they were ready to explode like shaken up bottles of beer.

Like all people, the buzzing hateful thoughts devoured the brothers’ consciousness. It was agony but they could not release it for fear of the Eye’s wrath. This pitch of hateful thoughts was even more shrieking when the brothers were together in blood and body for all people during this era shared the peculiar quality of hating those most close. Sure they hated coworkers, clerks, Facebook semblances, and the like. But with these objects of hate, the brothers were able to release stabs of hate through polite banter and, put simply, showing off. Since kinships fell outside this convention of silent attacks, the hate the brothers felt for each other was all the more wild and intense.

These brothers hated each other more than anyone has hates anyone else before because they were nearly the same person. Triplets at birth, they grew up with the exact same likes and dislikes, friends and enemies…They were so identical that the hatred between them blurred into the most intense kind of hatred of all: self-hatred. Now this hatred was multiplied by three and reached a pitch that no mortal could bare. They needed a way to release it without angering the Eye. And they did. They discovered a way of saying what they mean without really saying what they mean. They invented fiction and the story. They learned how to evince their hateful thoughts through the stories they told. And so evil, through untrue-true acts and words, was unleashed onto the world forever.

Why is it hard for so many of us to consider Canada home? How is it that the First Peoples of Canada feel homeless in their homeland? And why do multi-generational Canadians feel not quite right about calling Canada home?

According to Chamberlin it has to do with the stories we tell ourselves about Canada. These stories are what tie together reality and imagination, and what connects people to the land they inhabit (3). The realities that fill the stories are the actual states of affairs and geographic locations that have to do with home, whereas the imaginings are the values and meanings people attribute to home.

Problems arise when there are contradictions between realities and imaginations (74), and between stories. The realities and imaginings the First Peoples had that tied them to the land had been erased, systematically and intentionally, by the Canadian government. Without these stories, they have been left homeless in their homeland.

For non-indigenous Canadians, there are two contradictory stories we can tell ourselves. On the one hand, is the story of the pioneer who came to Canada to tame the “open”  wilderness and create a society that is now Canada. One the other hand, this “taming” essentially involved dismissing and discrediting the First People’s stories that tied the to their home (78). Their story was replaced by the pioneer’s story.

This second way of looking at the Canadian story creates another contradiction. Stories are what tie people to their land, but this story is one that severs Canadians from this land. It’s a hard pill to swallow that Canada was made our home by making others homeless. It creates tensions within our stories, such as whether Canada’s first prime minister was a national hero or a genocidal criminal.

Consequently, many Canadians don’t feel quite at home in Canada. For some, this is because they haven’t lived in one or any part of Canada long enough to internalize the unique stories that are needed to connect them to the land. For others, it is because they see themselves as descendants to thieves and are thereby complicit in the “unremittent horrors” the indigenous people faced (75) and continue to face today.

Perhaps this is a reason Canadians are so sensitive about criticizing immigration. Perhaps there’s part of us that feels like we’re being hypocrites by telling other they can’t come here to make their story. We know vicariously what kind of horrors this can unlock.

Works Cited

Welcome to My Blog!

My name is Ryan Littlechilds and I am happy to welcome you to my blog for English 470: Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres.

This a course about the Canadian story – who tells it and how they tell it. Specifically, we will focus on the differences and similarities between Indigenous and European literary and oratory traditions. Our study moves beyond the story itself, however, by also including meta-literary issues of whose stories “we” as “Canadians” hear and those “we” ignore. This course will address Canadian history and identity, racism, colonialism, canonization, and power.

The process by which we study these complex issues is by interacting through our blogs. Our professor, Dr. Paterson, has provided assignments that we post on our blogs. Students’ are expected to comment and respond on each other’s blogs, creating an interacting web of insights and questions. In short, this course involves two streams of learning. We will learn about important core Canadian issues through the power of stories. We will also learn how to effectively use collaborative online work spaces.

So what are my expectations of this courses? I have taken Dr. Paterson’s ENGL 301 before and it was the best online course I have taken yet because it was highly structure and practical. My advice to fellow students is to be vigilant on keeping up with the assignments. Although they are frequent, they are chunked in a way that if you spend about an hour a day on them, you should be able to keep up and do well. I have not come across an online course yet that chunks the assignments so well. ENGL 301 was also practical. I still continue to use what I learned in that course in my life (here’s an assignment we did). I am optimistic that this course will be the same.

I also expect to expand my knowledge about Canada and use this knowledge in my life and in my future career as a high school English teacher. I am very excited about this!

Nevertheless, I approach this course, as I do with all humanities courses, with a measure of skepticism. This course’s cannon of knowledge has been filtered by our professor and academia in general. There is no pure knowledge in the humanities. If there truly is a leftist bias within the humanities, then this course and all the others we have taken up to this point, has provided a mere shade of the spectrum of colours that make up the reality we think we know.